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Sunday, 6 August 2017

Movie Review: Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

Of all the cash cows for critics of bad films, no franchise
can compete with the lumbering juggernaut that is Michael Bay’s Transformers
series. From the rampant idiocy on display throughout to the frequent moments
of sexist, racist and otherwise crappy behaviour in the characters, right down
to his widely-lampooned visual overload style of direction, Bay has been a
walking target for at least a decade by this point. And finally, after showing
sympathy for the guy’s more recent efforts as director and even producer, I
have an excuse to get involved in this whole mess myself. To date, I have seen
all the previous Transformers flicks in the cinema, and I can hardly recall a
series with so many immediately and hilariously terrible moments as Bay’s ode
to the adolescent boy in us all. And apparently, judging by initial press
reactions, this seems to be the worst entry yet. How in the hell is that possible?
Let’s dive right in and discover the extremely depressing answer. This is
Transformers: The Last Knight.

The plot: Alien robots attack each other. Some humans get
involved but don’t do that much. Anthony Hopkins dies a little on the inside.

The acting here is probably the only consistently good part
about this whole thing that doesn’t involve some form of computer wizardry.
Mark Wahlberg is decent, although not a patch on his turn in Age Of Extinction;
Isabela Moner is so good that you’ll legitimately wish that she was the lead, or at the
very least given more agency than what she’s thrown here; Laura Haddock is a
painfully mediocre love interest, in-line with all the others as per this
franchise, and it really says something when you have someone this connected to
the story of King Arthur and yet she never
feels like a person of actual importance. John Turturro and Josh Duhamel make a return to
line their wallets, and are quite wasted in the process, Jerrod Carmichael fulfills
the Annoying Racial Humour quotient that these films must carry out by law, and
Hopkins gives a performance that in no way is deserved by his dialogue. It is
legitimately cringe worthy how much of a fuck he shouldn’t be giving here.

Back when I discussed Age of Extinction in my Critical Disagreements of 2014 list, I mentioned that Bay seemed to be improving
somewhat. Well, I’ve come to the realization that that was largely due to the
overall juvenile tendencies of the scripts for these films, which in AoE were
very muted. Of course, that is overlooking a far bigger problem to do with Bay
himself: His approach to action scenes. To put it simply, he basically treats
action films like Brazzers treats their productions: Make everything look
exciting, never keep the camera still and get through the boring crap as
quickly as possible to get to the good bits. Now, in small doses, this isn’t a
half-bad idea: Hell, Mad Max: Fury Road was arguably just one giant action
sequence and that garnered praise to the ends of the Earth. In the hands of
Michael Bay, however, it results in a film where the audience is constantly
bombarded with set pieces and firefights to the point of eventual numbness.
There’s no real break in the action here; the closest we get is the main scene
with Burton, and that was just a massive exposition dump before getting right
back to the explosions. This is a two-and-a-half-hour long fight, the action
constantly running over every single locale we get given without any chance to
actually absorb where the fight is, who it is involving and, more importantly,
why we should care about any of it.

This isn’t helped by the writing, brought to us by the duo
behind the original Iron Man, a mostly-producer and a story credit from
everyone’s favourite hack Akiva Goldsman. Like any other Transformers film, it
is a complete clusterfuck: Numerous groups all running in unison against and
occasionally alongside each other, about three different plots to destroy the
world and an incredibly vain attempt to involve human interaction in the whole
affair. Said attempt results in not only far more time being given to the
humans than anything Cybertronian, but also barely anything for the
Transformers to do other than shoot things. I don’t care how cool John Goodman
sounds a cigar-chomping alien robot commando; not when he feels as much a
throwaway as Optimus himself. Yeah, I don’t know how they did it but they
managed to screw up even the basics of this kind of story by giving Optimus
Prime an embarrassingly ill-thought-out heel turn and then failing to actually
do anything with it. When you turn your franchise’s most recognizable character
into the enemy, you better be able to do it well; take a lesson from Fate Of The Furious on that front. The film seems far more interested in hinting at other stories that would probably be a
lot more interesting, like Transformers fighting alongside the Knights of the
Round Table or Bumblebee fighting Nazis. It is quite remarkable how a film can
have all of these story ideas, look at them, and say “Nah, let’s just do the
same old shit we always do.”

And that, ultimately, is the biggest problem with this whole
thing: Nothing has changed. The slim alterations I saw in AoE have been
completely removed, defaulting back to the casually racist quips and
characterization along with using women largely as objects rather than human
beings. The action scenes, the nauseating camera work, the genuinely impressive
effects work that the film never gives us a chance to properly enjoy, the
shoehorned-in human element, the global-level threat; none of this is new. But
somehow, it gets even worse. See, even though the other films aren’t exactly well-regarded,
they still had their own memorability to them. From “I’m directly below the
enemy scrotum” to Ken Jeong as Deep Wang to Shia LaBullshitArtist awkwardly
talking with his parents about him supposedly masturbating in his bedroom (yeah,
for the uninitiated, the Transformers films are weird), the other films were certainly bad but were at least
notably bad. Not here, though. The hateful dialogue may still be in effect but
it’s as if it’s been toned down just enough so that it’s noticeable but doesn’t
leave any real impact. The film even tries to lampshade its own racism in a
scene between Cade and the owner of his home/junkyard, before just proceeding
as normal; remember, it’s not stupid if you admit that it’s stupid(!) It’s all
just noise and sparks and clunking bodies shuffling across the board at this
point, and more than anything resembling anger, all I have is apathy.

All in all, while the special effects are still very high
quality and the acting manages to work through the frankly embarrassing dialogue,
there’s no escaping the simple fact that this film doesn’t need to exist. At
five films in, it seems that even Bay himself is getting tired of it and it
definitely shows, recycling the same overblown story and not even bothering to
properly use the intriguing plot elements buried within it while lathering it
in constant action nausea. It’s dull, it’s not worth your time, money or
bandwidth, and if Michael Bay is serious this time about stepping away from
this franchise, it would be the smartest decision he’s made since doing Pain
& Gain. It’s worse than A Dog’s Purpose, as at least there the argument
could be made for some kind of meaning behind it; here, we have the amount of
thematic fidelity you would expect from a Call Of Duty game. However, since this
fills me with little more than resignation, it still fares better than xXx: Return Of Xander Cage, which was a legitimate disappointment.